A load of questions :)

1) How do I backup my sites seperately, and actually be able to unzip them? I tried through plesk and I get a lot of corrupted file, it'd be possible to run gzip through SSH, but this goes against the spirit of having a control panel.

2) Do you know of a good MySQL backup script that will backup my databases and email them to me?

3) How do I optimize my services? I am not using email except outbound (through PHP), can I disable qmail and not worry about that? I already have eaccelerator and various PHP / Apache tweaks done.

4) I noticed my load just spiked a few minutes ago, can I see what this was?

5) What misc security measures should I take, perhaps a list of some large / small ones. I am exclusively using the following services.... Apache/Mysql (No Outside), FTP, Email (Outbound Only), and SSH occationally.

6) How do I tell eaccelerator to clear the cache beyond actually going into SSH and manually rm -rf ing everything in the cache directory. I want to disable mtime check for more efficiency.

Edit (Somemore)...

7) I have a .php file that executes every 2 minutes via a cronjob. This results is the nice effect of creating a load of copies of the .php file (since I run wget to execute it). How do I have crontab either run this from a directory, or overwrite instead of creating copies.

2) Do you know of a good MySQL backup script that will backup my databases and email them to me?

Click to expand...

With this question, it may be useful for other ppl, mysqldumper does a great job of this - it can either email or ftp the db to wherever... and there is no php timeout due to the way they do the dumps.